How young children come to recommend resource choices that reduce waste

Whereas adults are often motivated to minimize material waste, young children are notoriously wasteful of material resources. Wastefulness in children could arise because they do not see the value in minimizing material waste. We explored this possibility in four experiments on children aged 3–7 (total N = 514). Children saw vignettes where an agent chose between two resources: a smaller resource that resulted in minimal waste or a larger one that resulted in greater waste. Around 5.5 years, children indicated that others should select the smaller resource (paper and foods) when this would reduce waste, showing that they think others should minimize material waste. For example, when a person could create a paper snowflake using either a larger or smaller sheet of paper, children aged 5.5 and older recommended using the smaller sheet (reducing the amount of paper wasted as scraps). The experiments also found that this preference does not arise from a simple heuristic to choose smaller resources. Overall, our findings suggest that development in children’s responses resulted from change in their understanding of waste. However, we discuss other potential explanations for the findings, and avenues for future research. • We investigated 3–7-year-olds’ understanding of material waste. • Children judged how agents should complete goals that would produce some waste. • From age 5.5, children recommended methods of completing goals which minimized waste. • We discuss whether older children's success could reflect heuristics rather than true reasoning about waste.